Introduction

In the competitive and ever-evolving field of design, professionals need to continuously develop their skills and abilities. However, becoming a truly great designer often goes beyond refining technical expertise. This blog post explores how cultivating personal interests and nurturing a designer’s humanity can lead to a more human-centered approach to design work.

The Importance of Personal Growth for Designers

The best designers are people who cultivate themselves. In most cases, designers – like all humans – grow into these qualities over time. Good designers are invested in their own growth, but not simply from the professional development perspective. They invest in their growth as human beings in many ways that have nothing to do with design.

Nurturing Creativity through Non-Design Pursuits

Designers can benefit from creative projects and pursuits beyond design in which they invest their time and energy. These pursuits enable them to experiment, use different muscles, and find meaning they can’t find elsewhere. Engaging in activities unrelated to design can spark new ideas, boost creative thinking, and ultimately help designers become more innovative in their work.

How Passions Beyond Design Enrich and Diversify Our Experiences

Having passions outside of design work fills up designers as people. Music, art, and theatre are just a few interests that can enrich designers, deepening and diversifying the range of experiences they empathize with and can draw on in their work. These passions make designers more human-centered by broadening their understanding of the world and its people.

Embracing Humanity as a Designer

So maybe being human-centered isn’t simply about centering our design process around other humans. Maybe it’s about being centered in our humanity. By cultivating our humanity, we cultivate our ability to connect to others. In other words, what makes us more human-centered might also make us more human.

The Connection Between Being Human-Centered and Being More Human

Designers who embrace their humanity also accept their faults and infinite capacity to synthesize information, ask new questions, make judgments, take chances, and follow threads into new possibilities. Recognizing and accepting our imperfections can help us better understand and empathize with the people we design for, ultimately leading to more effective and human-centered design solutions.

Conclusion

The journey to becoming a great designer goes beyond honing technical skills and involves embracing and cultivating one’s humanity. By pursuing passions and interests outside of the design world, designers can nurture their creativity, deepen their empathy, and adopt a more human-centered approach. Ultimately, personal growth and self-development make us better designers and enrich our lives and help us become more well-rounded individuals.